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Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality

Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality

Chapter:

(p.167)
6 Socialist Cultures of Rhetoric and Physicality

Source:

Embodied Nation

Author(s):

Simon Creak

Publisher:

University of Hawai'i Press

DOI:10.21313/hawaii/9780824838898.003.0007

This chapter looks at how the Lao People's Revolutionary Party's (LPRP) “revolution in culture and thought” aimed to build a “new socialist person” as a requisite factor for the construction of socialism. Strong and healthy, the new socialist person was defined by physical as well as moral and behavioral characteristics, which would be produced by a mass sport and physical culture movement created for this purpose. In common with other socialist reforms, efforts to build a mass sport and physical culture movement aimed at producing the socialist person confronted insurmountable barriers. The official reports that document this failure nevertheless illustrate more fundamental consequences of the socialist obsession with physicality, as the regime privileged the corporeal over the intellectual and produced an entire cosmology of socialist change couched in physical metaphor and idiom.

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PRINTED FROM HAWAII SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hawaii.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hawaii University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HSO for personal use (for details see www.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 December 2018